Content is merely the mechanical process to make communication and persuasion happen.

The creative act occurs in the brain.

Content simply transports the thought into the brain of others.

If you have other things to do you can stop reading now, the above 4 lines will be the best thing you have learned today.

For those who like to go a little deeper, read on.

Content marketing has been around for a while, although most businesses have a problem in properly using it to achieve their objectives. It’s a complex technique to get right, which relies on methodologies antithetical to most business minds. This is why most businesses should stop content marketing right now and place all of their spend on advertising.

It still represents the most effective, low cost way to gain market share, but only if it is done correctly and done by people who understand the nuance of communication and persuasion.

Some see it as a way to increase the ranking of their keywords in search engines. Others see it as a way to get people on their website and get their credit cards out.

Both things are worth persuing, but they are not the most effective results you can get from content marketing. For a long time, online marketers published content to get optimise the title tag of the web page and pull in the traffic from Google, add in a few paid links for guest posts, and your off to the races. The old techniques worked well back in the day. But things have changed.

Along comes the Hummingbird algo and things all get semantic, contextual and lots of other words that will not get you laid at a Dolce & Gabanna party, and the old techniques no longer work. The SEO agency changes brand to become a “content marketing agency”, or digital agency and this makes perfect sense as it communicates better to the people who we want to communicate to.

Because Google still relies on links, they are still important. In my opinion they are obfuscating their use of social activity as a signal, probably because it could be easily gamed. But social is important in its own right, regardless of whether Google taps into it and uses it as a signal.

Which brings me to the point of this post, “Why waste money on content marketing?”. I think the answer that most people would have hanging in their head but would never iterate in a verbalised format is that they “hope” content marketing would work.

The data however is against them. Consider a research report published by Buzzsumo.com:

The research, which analyzed the shares and links of 1 million posts, found a low level of content engagement they characterized as “striking:”

* 50% of randomly selected posts received 8 shares or less
* 75% of these posts received 39 shares or less
* 75% of these posts achieved zero referring domain links

Now, these are only the posts that they found, we don’t know how much content gets published that does not even get found by the Buzzsumo search bot.

Maybe you think this is OK for 50% of posts to receive 8 shares or less because the other 50% of the blog posts a business is putting out gets 1,000’s of shares. But if you look at most blogs you see that the share is consistent. It either gets a huge amount of shares consistently, or it gets a little amount consistently.

In other words, it’s not the content that is driving the shares.

If it were, then people like Seth Godin, who sometimes writes stuff that is a tad crusty around the edges (who doesn’t) wouldn’t still gets links and social shares. The evidence clearly shows that an influencer with a rabid fan base can get mediocre content promoted. When someone with little influence can put out great content and it mostly gets ignored.

It’s the culture, the brand, the emotional connection between the reader and everything the piece of content represents. It is not the content in isolation. You couldn’t get anything doing without content of course, it is essential, but it is only part of what makes the piece of content successful.

Unless your content is in the top 10% of all content currently being produced, you may as well not bother.

In fact you may as well invest your money in cupcakes and give your copywriters a rest.

Which will mean you will have happy copywriters and wont have shoveled more mediocre web content online, for people to ignore.

Do you ever wonder why your stuff doesn’t get any social signals, when not even your own staff, whose very jobs depend on your success, ignore your content?

It’s very simple, and you don’t even have to hire me as a content strategist for me to give the benefit of my years of experience.

It’s because your content is mediocre.

Your content isn’t crap, because crap does get a reaction.

It’s just that it’s beige, bland, boring, something that few people in their right mind would even think of sharing with their friends. It’s not sexy content.

The thing is, your agency isn’t going to tell you because you pay them for the production and they don’t hae the skill set to be a kickass publisher of attention attracting content.

Your copywriter is not going to tell you. They are too worried that the 504th line of their epic poem they are writing about Ernest Hemmingway’s beard to worry too much about your misunderstanding of content marketing.

You do content, because you are told that is what you should do. You hear it at conferences, on blogs, from smooth talking salesmen from the local SEO content marketing agency.

But it’s not what you should be investing in.

Because good content comes from good culture.

What I mean by culture is you have to have an interesting story and be prepared to tell it. You have to be transparent about who you are. You can’t hide any more, people like to buy from people they like, they want to associate with people they aspire to be.

This age has changed from the an information age, because information is flowing as freely as the screams of joy from a Tennessee whore house (too much?).

See it from the perspective of someone who does not know your business. Why should they care, what is it about you are your website that makes them excited, that connects with them on an emotional level.

Now, most of you wont get this and that’s fine. Connecting the dots in this new age of content shock, you will realise that content marketing is not a sustainable strategy and there needs to be a little secret sauce added to get things moving.

That secret is one of culture, some call it branding but I think it’s way more than that. It’s also about relationships and how you are as a human being.

This is a bit of a rambling blog post I know, and not honed and edited to maximise the readers experience. But this is written in one pass, because that’s my culture. It’s where the good stuff is. It may not even make sense to most, as someone said of my last post. “I need a sub-editor”, and that is true, but don’t let that get in the way of the message I am sending out here.

If you want to invest in content marketing, understand that for it to work you and your company needs to get behind it and use it as a way for your passion to reach the wider public.

Your brand, your ethos, your integrity is what will drive a great content marketing strategy. If you don’t have these then I am not going to lie to you, it’s going to be hard. What content marketing does is amplify what you already have, if you have a cold, dead heart that is full of a black bile of cynicism. Then that is what is going to get amplified.

But if you really care about your brand, your product, your service, and love your customers then that is what is going to be promoted. If you have these in abundance, then you absolutely need content marketing. Not the stuff you buy off the shelf from a black hearted, cynical, agency with an expensive office with exposed brick walls, pot plants and and bean bags.

Ideally it should be in-house, from the people who really care and know your business. Failing that, hire someone who is passionate about communication and hire them to tell the stories your business has, rather than doing content marketing just because you heard about it at the latest Chamber of Commerce meet up.

Very glad to be closing the door on 2015, which was a mix of high stress and high excitement. I made incredible, boner mistakes, mixed with deft, clever moves which always left me thinking, “did I really do that”.

Whenever you do something brilliant, don’t question it, don’t deconstruct, just quickly move on to the next thing and hope no one noticed how surprised you were that you pulled it off.

The converse is also true, although much more can be learned from mistakes than my wins.

I put down the mistakes to putting more effort into things I am daggy at than things I am cool and froody with.

I’ve noticed I have become very good at strategic, content marketing thinking. This is probably down to my experience in working in the space, clocking it at 17 years. Although I still feel I am just getting started.

It’s with that thinking in late December of the previous year I decided to change things a little.

No more content creation work.

More hiring out my brain for strategic content work, mostly for organisations needing an outside voice that has walked the path of experience.

A new focus on a new start up I am launching, which will help people develop their content. Right now the only thing holding it back is deciding on a name. This is going to be a lot of fun and something that is crafted to be incredibly useful to anyone trying to develop their content marketing. More of this in later post.

Less distraction from social media, and from those whose output is always negative. To this end I have completely burned down my Twitter account to rebuild, based on people I like, people I learn from and people who inspire me.
In the past I have hesitated because I felt that part of the reason I wanted to follow someone was to influence them. That thinking feels wrong and does not work for me.

Authenticity cannot be constructed, you have to follow what you feel is right. Intuition is an amazing thing, listening to what your sub-conscious is telling you can bring real benefits.

This year will be more about doing stuff. Making stuff happen and travelling with people who share that mindset.

This is a great time for people building great content on the web.

Delivering the content that people want will be the ultimate factor in whether or not a website will rank.

Yes of course there will still be those anomalies which a clever SEO can exploit, but it would be foolish to base a business on hunting down the latest thing that Google has not yet fixed.

There is nothing really new in the interview, although it is a great interview and ties together a bunch of methodologies that have been working for sometime.

We all know that we should have an effective social media following on places like Twitter.

We all know that we need to be producing content that is better than any other content which is currently available to the reader.

We all know we should create synergy between all content and online communication output.

So nothing new there.

But how many of us really implement this? When I want something to happen I write a blog post, do a bit of Tweeting, a bit of emailing, a bit of commenting etc., until I get the result.

I already have my processes set in place, I am already a member of various online social tribes – I have my own gang of trusted creative rebels on which I can call upon. I already know my market and what is needed and more importantly how to get people to be attracted, engaged and then what will get them to react.

Which of course I should know having been doing this for quite some time now and having the good fortune to work with some brilliant, clients in a variety of sectors. Getting the client to do what is needed is the hardest part of the equation as results are not obvious before the process begins.

Even though I can show that doing something very specific like producing an infographic on going to Mars can get high quality editorial links from the likes of Wired.com, Mashable.com etc. It still takes large amounts of energy to create presentations that leads the client along the path.

But the client thing is a tangent and not crucial to the core thing being discussed.

What is important

I think it helps if we think along the lines of publishing something popular, than creating quality content. Quality is a relative term and means different things to different people, whereas we can easily define popularity.

Popular content, not quality content.

This is my experience over the 15 years I have been creating web pages to get links out of people. It’s that you need to be creating content that people really, really want to consume.

Thing is, most of those in my industry are more interested in paying a writer £15 to produce an article than £1,500.

Which is absolutely fantastic, because you are competing with people who only have enough juice to get up half of the hill. If you “get it”, you can dominate. That is the secret.

What’s also interesting is that the regular business person finds it hard to get to grasps with the aspects of content marketing, yes I know there are success stories out there, but relative to their whole sector they are tiny. The second secret is that this will always be the case.

There will always be opportunity for those who can create popular content

People in my industry, and I am one of them, are always babbling on about the latest technological advancement in blogging or social media. It becomes this huge wall of noise, and mostly it’s relatively unimportant as it’s not the technology that attracts. It’s the content

It’s the content

It’s one thing of course to define and understand this, another thing completely to implement it in a fashion that delivers an effective ROI. Which is where I tap my 15 years experience in the industry, I have seen and studied huge numbers of real time campaigns that have both succeeded and failed in this time.

A very, very small percentage of websites out there currently implement best practice content marketing, seo, blogging, social media etc. You may not think so because you spend all your time only consuming the good stuff and so think that is all what exists.

Local is getting very tasty

When you talk to the people who are experts in local online marketing, it gets very interesting. As it doesn’t seem to take that much investment for a local business to get a good ROI out of local online marketing. Obviously this is because of the geographical parameters being fixed, and that is not going to change.

Local requires a change in the mind set, but at its basic it is a similar methodology to the huge corporate beast.

Learning from the Tabloids

To the people who I personally coach in this area, I tell them to think like the Economist and create like the Sun, newspaper. To be a dealer and not an addict. To think about the reader as being hungry for a specific type of content and simply creating that content and promoting it.

It’s simplistic, but the complexity is in the cultural awareness and defining the thing that people want at that specific time. It’s impossible for the business person running a plumbing supplies website for example. They do not have time to sit on Reddit, Twitter or consume the latest from Huffpo or find that smaller story that fits their niche perfectly.

You need an experienced, culturally aware individual who understands what gets people to link and create social signals and how that folds in to the websites brand development.

Even I can only count about 30 – 40 people who can do this to the required level. Most of them are highly creative, maverick social rebels types. Most freelance and wouldn’t be caught dead working the 9-5 in house or for an agency. Not that in-house, or agency people can’t do this, but it’s not for people who crave security or who can only operate if they have a defined working structure.

The creativity needs to flow in an environment that is unstable from a business POV or at least looks wonky when you look at it through a business lens.

If you find one of these creative geniuses who can connect all the different parts and implement, delivering and effective ROI, make sure you give them what they want to work on your stuff. Do not let them go over to the opposition, because it’s really hard to find these types of people as they are rare.

If they are aware of their value then you will need to pay premium rates, but if your business model is set up to soak up extra business then it’s worth it. I cannot tell you how many client servers I have crashed because of all the traffic I send clients.

Yes, I was a Mad Men fan. Everything that needs to be said about the show has already been said, by people with larger expense accounts than mine.

Seeing a distilled wisdom presented in the infographic below, I realise how much it told us about the creative process and you can easily apply this to modern content creation. Not only that but I like how it takes apart the process.

The thing that resonates with me, is “get in the frame of mind”. Storytelling is a natural, innate skill that most humans have buried just beneath the surface. It’s not so much mechanical as it is printed in our DNA, we simply need to feel it.

Of course, language is mechanical and rule based, but too many rules stifle the creativity. If Don Draper taught us anything it was that if you never break the rules, you will never fulfil your creativity.

You take something that is very funny, “Alan Partridge”.
You add a hard to “get links”, subject like “retirement”.
You then add the mechanics and methodology of infographic creation and you have a tasy bit of content marketing.

Creative thinking in content marketing is very hard, as you have to keep producing content at an ever increasing rate. And as Mitch Joel has cheekily suggested Content Marketing is Dead, it isn’t of course and never will be. But he uses the thought to intelligently explore a different way of thinking about content marketing and comes up with the line…

They want to feel like the finished products deserves its space in the book store… or on your Kindle. Authors only publish things that have real value.

Think about this. Take a published author and commission them to write a 30,000 word book to be published for Amazon Kindle. It would probably cost the same as a few infographics. I don’t see anyone doing that right now.

But we will.

Having created a short and snappy, but highly useful book with actionable content, I know how such a think raises your profile.

Instead of knocking out the odd blog post, commission a book.
Are any of your competitors doing this?

If you need help with this matter or any other content marketing issue, get in touch and I will tell you a few other cool things you could do that your competitors are not.

Links are the result, not the production. You produce content to get links, you do not build links you build content. (lets get away from this mindset of building links and focus on the reality that is building content for human beings to read)
Content That solves problems gets links

We are not in the seo, link building, web master business, we are in the solving problem business.
The reader is looking for solutions, not content. Linkers love solutions. (It may be content, but is it a solution. (We need to adopt the mind set of problem solvers, not web masters).

Content as a term is an abstract, solutions is the specific focus that works.

To be able to publish solutions you must first know the problem. These are the problems within your niche.
To know the problem you must know your niche.

You don’t have to know your niche, but you should know someone who knows your niche. Publishing solutions can be outsourced.
General information has little or no value , solutions that address specific problems has high value. Intensive research can produce all the problem solving content you will need. Again, this can be outsourced.

Outsourcing, your team must include someone who is an expert in your niche.

You cannot dominate a niche unless you have someone on your team who is an expert, or better still, you are the expert.

The strategic aim is to dominate the niche, we do this by being useful.

Own as much of your digital real estate as you can, as talked about at startbloggingonline.com. Don’t build a Facebook page, get your own domain and build your own blog or website. It’s both easier and cheaper than you think. Create your own email list, rather than having your listen controlled by these social media, corporate entities.

Social media billionaire barons don’t do what they do because they like you. They do it because they can make money out of you. Don’t trade away the sweat of your labour for a few magic beans.

Don’t muck about on someone else’s platform, get your own and make that your base. Sure, join all the other platforms, but work them, don’t let them work you.

The message, your message should be under your control as much as possible.

Knowing what to blog about, to create content about every day is a bit of a task. It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. Of course you need content that works rather than the filler that most other blogs and websites churn out. You need to create content for people rather than the Google bot.

One effective way to keep the content ideas fresh, is to create content around the news.

The news has a few things going for it from a content marketers perspective.

It changes every day

People talk about it on social media

People hunger for more detail about a specific news story

Not all news is bad, negative or depressing

There are many examples of succesful content marketers surfing this news wave every day. It’s not exactly newsjacking, that’s another thing, but it is using that jump off point of the news to further the narrative.

Black Friday was interesting, especially in the UK. There were a large number of people in the “megh” camp, who just couldn’t be bothered to get excited about saving money on a bargain. And even in Cornwall the excitement was in the barely bothered camp.

I talked to traders about this, Bakery 46 and Near and Far Nepalese Clothing and Bakery 46 both said it was pretty much like any other Friday and not much difference. You may argue that such small traders cannot climb onto the Black Friday wagon, but there there is news there is content marketing opportunities and small traders can absolutely benefit from a relatively cheap form of marketing.

I am sure you don’t need me to tell you that the new Star Wars movie is out next year.

But what are your plans to take advantage celebrate this event to benefit your website?

I shall be looking at how this can be done in the next few months. But let me be clear that this is not about dangling your brand message in front of a Stars Wars hungry mob, but to enable your marketing push to create content that satisfies that hunger. You may not be able to do this unless you are a fan or can model the mindset of the fan.

I fully expect a number of highly paid marketing execs to be ripped apart by the ravenous hordes when they get this wrong.

Cats. Love em or hate em, they’re the unequivocal and unofficial mascot of the internet. As much as we’re keen on the odd canine moment captured on film, man’s best friend doesn’t get a look in when it comes to cats. The internet is quite literally chock full of them.

But why? Does the vast number of cats we see online represent our preference to them as pets? Well no, not even close. According to many studies into pet numbers the number of cat owners and dog owners on both side of the Atlantic is pretty much even, with a slight preference for dogs in the UK and cats in the US.

So, why the fascination with cats over dogs (or any other amusing pet for that matter)? Well it’s genuinely accepted from dog and cat lovers alike, that there’s something altogether more natural about a cat doing something because, unlike a dog, you know they haven’t done it to get your attention. Amy-Mae Elliot puts it quite nicely in an article for Mashable back in 2010:

“When a dog gets in a box, it’s because he desperately wants you to think he’s cool. When a cat does it, it’s because it suddenly felt like the right thing to do at the time. More often than not, it totally was. I think it’s the very aloofness of cats that makes us want to caption their thoughts, or put them in front of a keyboard and see what happens.”

With their inherent watchability in mind then, it’s impossible for any of us in the digital marketing industry to ignore the profound influence cats can have over huge swathes of people and their uncanny ability to make us share images and videos of them. Regardless of how we feel personally about their unchallenged ubiquity online, the behaviour of the humble cat represents something that has the capacity to become instantly viral. Replicating this is surely gold dust to any marketer.

Of course you could just put cats in your marketing and be done with it. Below are ten examples of companies that have. Enjoy.

This hugely successful ad packs a double punch of cuteness with the frankly phenomenal miming of a five year old girl called Jolie Forrest to the 1985 power ballad ‘We Built this City’ by Starship. What’s the cat in the basket doing? Well harmonising with her of course. Unadulterated sillineness it may be but it certainly worked for mobile phone network provider Three, who saw nearly a million interactions with the video on social media after it aired on ITV’1 This Morning. Current hits on YouTube stand at 5.6 million views.

Ok so while the advert isn’t particularly good it’s impossible to have any list about cats on the internet and not include everyone’s favourite cantankerous kitty. The advert clunkily attempts to combine the dry and sardonic humour of a thousand Grumpy cat captions and images that have gone before it, with a product aimed specifically at kids. On a comedic level, the result is arguably a complete failure but hey, it’s Grumpy Cat and even that insipid animated bee can’t distract us from our insatiable desire to gawk and giggle at this permanently depressed looking creature (Grumpy Cat’s real name is actually ‘Tard’ and her permanent sullen expression is actually the result of a form of feline dwarfism – I know, you feel bad for laughing now, right?). The YouTube shares aren’t really indicative of the adverts success either as this video is an unofficial upload as it was made for TV.

Satire can be a disastrous technique in advertising if it’s not done well. At best you can come off unfunny, at worst confuse and completely mislead your audience as to the nature of what you do or what you’re about. This video from Electronic Data Systems Corp (now part of HP) on the other hand is clever-tongue-in-cheek advertising of the highest order. The company took the popular idiom of herding cats (meaning the futile attempt to create a sense of order from chaotic scenarios) and produced a seemingly real life docu-ad, complete with interviews from ‘real cat herders’ going about their haphazard work on the open plains of the US Midwest. The result is both a powerful metaphor for what EDS does and a hilarious piece of farcical satire that puts the humble and independently minded cat at its heart. The video currently has 1.2 million views on YouTube.

Again some clever advertising from US Advertising Agency, John St, with a cat video about cat videos. The concept works on many levels and ultimately gets the viewer second guessing whether this is real or not. This technique makes use of the internet’s propensity for both cat videos and elaborate wind ups and pranks and weaves them both into an almost believable satirical docu-ad. What’s so bold is that the company uses its own brand as the butt of the joke, leaving the more discerning viewer in no doubt that these guys are both good at what they do and have a very sharp sense of humour. With 2.5 million views this has done incredibly well for a B2B ad.

Sublime advertising from the imaginative and at times somewhat surreal video marketers at Cravendale. The advert plays on cats insatiable love of milk and something we humans all take for granted as we idly chomp on our breakfast cereal in the mornings; opposable thumbs. But what if cats had opposable thumbs? The resulting video is a prime example of our desire to anthropomorphise cats but takes the premise to such an extreme that it would almost seem nightmarish if it weren’t so funny. Silly, hilarious and somewhat dark, Cravendale’s humour is perfectly pitched.

Actually a meme of Charlie Schmidt’s Keyboard cat video, which has over 36 million views, this cat video has played on the cultural recognition of the original by creating a similarly ridiculous video of a cat playing the keyboard. The only slight variation on the original is the presence of a lone pistachio nut on the keyboard, which our furry friend then proceeds to break open in true Liberace style as he continues playing that annoying tune. Tenuous band wagon jumping here but it’s clearly paid off for Wonderful Pistachios, with 2.5 million
views and counting.

A different approach altogether from Ikea in this simple but quite beautifully edited advert. What do you get when you let loose a load of cats in an Ikea store after everyone’s gone home for the night? Well cats just being… cats, as it turns out. No doubt many countless hours of footage were edited to come up with this final montage but at the end of the day this is just cats being adorably cute and jumping and running on all things Ikea. Overlay some lovely music and you’ve got yourself a winner. That’s the thing with cats; you just need to point the camera and film. Eventually they’ll do something cute.

In the tradition of somewhat darkly comic adverts, Skittles’ freaky cat themed video invites you to put your finger on your screen. Whether you do or not what follows is unabashedly weird, funny and quite unpredictable. This is a prime example of advertising that is built for the internet. I suspect with the broad demographic sweep of a terrestrial television ad campaign, many viewers might have found this ad just too weird for comfort and the whole thing might have gone down like a lead balloon. But with 7.1 million views and counting there’s definitely no shortage of individuals online that clearly appreciate the humour.

A change of tack entirely here. This video is actually a user created video but that’s not stopped GoPro cashing in bigtime on the hugely impressive 23 million views it’s got (the video itself was filmed entirely on a GoPro camera). Admittedly this video may still have packed an equally powerful emotional punch with a dog, but there’s just something universally appealing about the fireman rescuing a cat cliché. When it’s not actually a cat stuck up a tree, but the seemingly lifeless body of a kitten being rescued from a smoke filled room before being brought back to life by said fireman on the street with a tiny oxygen mask, then it’s almost too emotional to bear. And yet you can’t take your eyes off it. The fact that the footage has all been filmed on a GoPro camera almost seems inconsequential by the time the kitten splutters and shivers back to life, but that’s the power of clever brand advertising. With a little help from a brave firefighter, GoPro have certainly hit the jackpot in terms of brand exposure with this gem.

10. (Deleted, explanations of reasons why in the next cat post.)

This is a guest post contribution from Joe Cox, who is head of Content for Bristol based agency, Bespoke Digital.

Some links contain affiliate links, where I get paid a little bit of money if you buy. I only recommend products and services I have used and love.
It's a little bit of money and keeps me interested in creating more content here.
Free SEO Audit